Liliputin -1643

My execution was worse than a crime. Make no mistake about it ... "
Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien

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Missattrubuted to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord


C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.
It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

Reaction to the 1804 drumhead trial and execution of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, on orders of Napoleon. Actually said by either Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, legislative deputy from Meurthe (according to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) or Joseph Fouch§Ы, Napoleon's chief of police (according to John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), http://www.bartleby.com/100/758.1.html).


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Make no mistake about it

 used to show that you are certain about something:

Make no mistake, this decision is going to cause you a lot of problems.


–Thesaurus: synonyms and related words

Certainty

(as) clear as day idiom   
 (as) sure as eggs is eggs idiom   
 and that's flat! idiom   
 assure 
 assured 
 assuredly 
 cut and dried 
 decided 
 decidedly 
 deffo 
 definite 
 dispute 
 mistake 
 natch 
 pronounced 
 proof positive 
 seal 
 set/put the seal on sth idiom   
 solidly 
 stare 

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Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien (duc d'Enghien ) (Louis Antoine Henri)( 2 August 1772 – 21 March 1804) was a relative of the Bourbon monarchs of France. More famous for his death than for his life, he was executed on charges of aiding Britain and plotting against France. Royalty across Europe were shocked and dismayed at his execution. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was especially alarmed, and decided to curb Napoleon's power.

Seizure, trial and death

Early in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France, heard news which seemed to connect the young duke with the Cadoudal Affair, a conspiracy which was being tracked by the French police at the time. It involved royalists Jean-Charles Pichegru and Georges Cadoudal who wished to overthrow Bonaparte's regime and reinstate the monarchy. The news ran that the duke was in company with Charles Fran;ois Dumouriez and had made secret journeys into France. This was false; there is no evidence that the duke had dealings with either Cadoudal or Pichegru. However, the duke had previously been condemned in absentia for having fought against the French Republic in the Arm;e des emigree's. Napoleon gave orders for the seizure of the duke.
French dragoons crossed the Rhine secretly, surrounded his house and brought him to Strasbourg (15 March 1804), and thence to the Ch;teau de Vincennes, near Paris, where a military commission of French colonels presided over by General Hulin was hastily convened to try him. The duke was charged chiefly with bearing arms against France in the late war, and with intending to take part in the new coalition then proposed against France.

The military commission, presided over by Hulin, drew up the act of condemnation, being incited thereto by orders from Anne Jean Marie Ren; Savary, who had come charged with instructions to kill the duke. Savary prevented any chance of an interview between the condemned and the First Consul, and, on 21 March, the duke was shot in the moat of the castle, near a grave which had already been prepared. A platoon of the Gendarmes d';lite was in charge of the execution.
In 1816, his remains were exhumed and placed in the Holy Chapel of the Ch;teau de Vincennes.

Impact of death


Execution of the duc d'Enghien.

Royalty across Europe were shocked and dismayed. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was especially alarmed, and decided to curb Napoleon's power.

The duc d'Enghien was the last descendant of the House of Cond;; his grandfather and father survived him, but died without producing further heirs. It is now known that Jos;phine and Madame de R;musat had begged Bonaparte for mercy towards the duke; but nothing would bend his will. Whether Talleyrand, Fouch; or Savary bore responsibility for the seizure of the duke is debatable, as at times Napoleon was known to claim Talleyrand conceived the idea, while at other times he took full responsibility himself. On his way to St. Helena and at Longwood, Napoleon asserted that, in the same circumstances, he would do the same again; he inserted a similar declaration in his will, stating that "it was necessary for the safety, interest, and the honour of the French people when the Comte d'Artois, by his own confession, was supporting sixty assassins at Paris."

The execution of Enghien shocked the aristocracy of Europe, who still remembered the bloodletting of the Revolution. Either Antoine Boulay, comte de la Meurthe (deputy from Meurthe in the Corps l;gislatif) or Napoleon's chief of police, Fouch;, said about his execution "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute", a statement often rendered in English as "It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder." The statement is also sometimes attributed to Talleyrand.

Conversely, in France the execution appeared to quiet domestic resistance to Napoleon, who soon crowned himself Emperor of the French. Cadoudal, dismayed at the news of Napoleon's proclamation, reputedly exclaimed, "We wanted to make a king, but we made an emperor".

Cultural references

Tolstoy

The killing of the duc d'Enghien is discussed in the opening book of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The vicomte de Mortemart, a French ;migr; who supposedly knew the duke personally, is the focus of attention of the Russian aristocrats gathered at Anna Pavlovna Sherer's home:

The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing the murder of the duc d'Enghien. "After the murder of the Duc, even the most partial ceased to regard [Buonaparte] as a hero. If to some people he ever was a hero, after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on earth." The vicomte said that the duc d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him.(...)

It was an anecdote, then current, to the effect that the duc d'Enghien had gone secretly to Paris to visit Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon Bonaparte, who also enjoyed the famous actress' favors, and that in his presence Napoleon happened to fall into one of the fainting fits to which he was subject, and was thus at the Duc's mercy. The latter spared him, and this magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death. The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point where the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked agitated.

The actress Marguerite-Jos;phine Wiemer, known as "Mademoiselle George", was indeed Napoleon's mistress, but there is no evidence that the duc d'Enghien had anything to do with her, or that the story preserved to posterity by Tolstoy's masterpiece was anything more than one of the pieces of gossip and conspiracy theories current around Europe at the time.

Dumas

The killing of the duc d'Enghien is treated in The Last Cavalier by Alexandre Dumas. For example:

[T]he dominant sentiment in Bonaparte's mind at that moment was neither fear nor vengeance, but rather the desire for all of France to realise that Bourbon blood, so sacred to Royalist partisans, was no more sacred to him than the blood of any other citizen in the Republic.


"Well, then", asked Cambac;r;s, "what have you decided?"


"It's simple", said Bonaparte. "We shall kidnap the Duc d'Enghien and be done with it."

His death was also briefly mentioned in The Count of Monte Cristo:


'There wasn't any trouble over treaties when it was a question of shooting the poor Duc d'Enghien' "